Dalai Lama Finds China's Threats A Subject for Humor and Anxiety

By JOHN F. BURNS

Published: March 6, 1996

DHARMSALA, India, March 2—
Among the pilgrims who flock to the Dalai Lama's home-in-exile in these Himalayan hills, many regard him as a living god -- some of them Buddhist monks like the Dalai Lama himself, others refugees from faiths and places far removed from his native Tibet.

Since he fled to India in 1959, the Tibetan leader has grown accustomed to the cult of reverence in which Tibetans and non-Tibetans have enveloped him, especially since his teachings on nonviolence earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. But when the veneration gets a bit too much, the 60-year-old Tibetan has a way of puncturing the balloon.

In the 1960's, the Chinese Communists described me as a wolf in a monk's robe, as a murderer and a rapist," he said in an interview in an old bungalow here that is part of the compound given to the Tibetans by the Indian Government. "Then there are people who call me a Living Buddha."

"But these are two extremes," he said, breaking into a throaty chuckle. "In reality, I am just an ordinary human being." If this were true, the Dalai Lama could contemplate a quiet retirement here, after a life that was never his own from the moment in 1940 when he was installed, as a 5-year-old peasant's son, on the Dalai Lama's throne.

But recent years have underlined his importance as the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibetan Buddhists, and Beijing's apparent determination to whittle away his influence among the six million Tibetans in China.

The Dalai Lama has rarely been more alienated from the Chinese leadership than he is now. In January 1995, 15 years of sporadic and ultimately unproductive contacts with Chinese intermediaries on Tibet's future were broken off by China. Since then, China has reverted to a bitter hostility, to the Dalai Lama and to Buddhist institutions in Tibet.

Amnesty International says China began a new wave of arrests among Tibetans monks, nuns and independence activists about the time it broke off talks with the Dalai Lama. The rights group has published detailed reports of beatings of those arrested, and Chinese officials warned recently that they would close monasteries and nunneries if resistance continued.

The crackdown is a return to patterns that China has followed for decades. Although the repression eased after 1979, when Deng Xiaoping began the dialogue with the Dalai Lama by saying everything was negotiable except Tibet's remaining part of China, the cumulative damage has been enormous.

According to pamphlets issued by the Dalai Lama's office, the Chinese have closed or destroyed more than 6,000 monasteries and killed 1.2 million Tibetans since Communist troops overran Tibet in 1950.

Along with the current crackdown, the old vituperation against the Dalai Lama has crept back. Official Chinese diatribes have described him as a "splitist" and a "traitor" for not accepting China's demands that he acknowledge Tibet as "an inseparable part of China."

China also demands that he dismantle the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharmsala, and "stop engaging in activities to split the motherland," including his frequent overseas trips to promote Tibet's cause.

In November, the confrontation took a turn for the worse when China engineered the installation of its own candidate for the position of Panchen Lama, Tibet's second most important religious official.

The move, seven months after the Dalai Lama announced his own nomineee, left Tibetans with two 6-year-old boys, each identified as the reincarnation of the former Panchen Lama, who died in Beijing in 1989 at age 50. The Dalai Lama's choice, Gendun Choekyi Nyima, has disappeared, apparently into house arrest in Beijing, along with his parents and 50 monks and Tibetan laypeople associated with his nomination.

Some Tibetan officials suggest there may even have been moves in the last year by China's security agencies to mount an attempt on the Dalai Lama's life in Dharmsala, or perhaps against senior members of his entourage.

In December, the Indian authorities arrested three young Tibetans who crossed into India from Tibet earlier in the year in the guise of refugees. According to Tibetan officials here, two men and a woman, all in their 20's, are being held in an Indian jail after telling investigators they were recruited by Chinese security agencies, trained in techniques of infiltration, intelligence-gathering and weapons-handling and sent here to keep watch on the Dalai Lama.

Tempa Tsering, information chief in the exile government, said diaries taken from the three showed they watched the Tibetan leader closely. "They told us that they had been ordered to settle in Dharmsala and wait for further instructions," he said. The Indian authorities have tightened the Dalai Lama's security, assigning additional policemen to keep a round-the-clock watch inside his compound in the village of McLeod Ganj, 6,000 feet up in the hills above Dharmsala.

In the presence of a man who bears the titles of Holy Lord, Gentle Glory and Ocean of Wisdom, there is an absence of the portentousness that often accompanies a meeting with a president or prime minister. But behind the jocularity with which he greeted a visitor, the Dalai Lama seemed like a man with his patience wearing thin. At one moment he was joshing about his chances of living another 20 or 30 years. The next he was discussing the possibility that China may have entertained the idea of having him killed.

From what he had been told, he said, the three young intruders had said they had instructions to keep a watch on him. But whether this meant they might have planned to kill him was something else.

"I don't consider that someone will want to threaten my life," he said. "Personally, I have no enemies."